Homophones can be a problem in a society that doesn’t read. Some common ones (which many of us will have seen) may be forgiven: compliment and complement are often confused and in a variety of permutations of meaning; although I’m less tolerant of principle and principal, whose meanings are so similar that confusing the two can have… implications. “A principal I always adhere to…” could receive more raised eyebrows that the prepositional abuse might warrant. One would hope that even were a writer to perpetrate such errors, a decent editor would pick them up so I was astounded when my wife showed me a line from a book, published by Pan Macmillan, whose author is a "widely acclaimed" writer with some fourteen books in print. It reads (if memory serves), "...the moonlight fell across her taught breasts..." One wonders just what it was they were learning. When I posted this on a well-known authors’ site, one comment was, “Typos will sometimes creep in”. I responded that in my view, this was no typo but a severe misunderstanding of the word in question. To mistake taught for taut is such an astonishing gaffe, one wonders that editor is still employed; perhaps he/she isn’t any longer but many others are. I have seen, for example, references to “easedropping”, which I assume was what the writer/editor believed the word, “eavesdropping” to be; and a recent article in The Independent assured readers that a party was “held in a marquis on the lawn…” Very accommodating of him. Whenever I notice an issue in my own work that has escaped the net, I am livid with myself and rush out a new edition immediately. Mostly, they are missed commas or speech marks (although there was one severe grammatical faux pas that I can’t bring myself to admit to here!) Never have I got a word “wrong” in the way I’ve described and the prospect of paying for someone to edit my book and still be worried about gaffes would be too much to bear.

That sort of thing annoys me as much as it does you, Russell, and it happens frequently, even in books from the big publishing houses. It almost seems as if the author is dictating, rather than typing his work, and it's being transcribed by someone who doesn't have a good command of English. I love your word "homophonophobia" and will have to steal it (for conversations, not my own writing)!